


Our Magnum Opus

by MalthusIndex



Category: Warframe
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Gore, Infection, Infested, Loss of Control, Mind Control, Mind Manipulation, Mind replacement, Other, Parasites, Sharing a Body, Surgery, clinical
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-02-25 17:08:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22499581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalthusIndex/pseuds/MalthusIndex
Summary: The Corpus have isolated a particular gas mining platform around Jupiter and refuse to interact with it anymore, sealing the main door shut. Two Tenno go to investigate, curious as to why it's so unprotected - and are never heard from again. What's waiting on the other side isn't just malicious - it's trying to create something.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 15





	1. A Healthy Volunteer

**Author's Note:**

> Not all of the tags I've added so far appear yet, but don't feel disappointed just yet - this is only the beginning, and I love me some body horror stories...

“The Gas Processing Tower should be somewhere up ahead. I don’t see any Corpus goons, though, and I don’t want to try and get inside without you here. Where are you?”

Mia was struggling to fit her massive Atlas Warframe through the cramped vents of the Jupiter processing facility, pausing every few steps to listen out for the robotic grumbles of the various security proxies that wandered the structure’s halls. The infiltration had been a success so far, thanks to the other Ivara-using Tenno that had been acting as her overwatch and reconnaissance, but things were about to get a lot more difficult.

“You tell me, Cal, I’m following _your_ map, I have no Void-damn idea where I am.”

“Fine. It’s basically a straight line anyway, just keep going forwards. I’m on watch.”

These vents _stunk_. She hadn’t really thought about it before, but Jupiter’s gas had a smell to it – a horrible stench, like a mixture of rotten Kubrow eggs and cleaning fluid. It seemed to get worse as she went deeper into the ventilation system, probably because it was being actively pumped into her Warframe’s face. The light at the end of the square tunnel was getting closer, but it was still quite a long stretch of nothing: she could have started _and_ won a small firefight in that time without even setting off the alarms, but _no_ , Cal needed things to be done ‘professionally’ this time.

Slowly pulling herself through the grate tunnel, she noticed that the ventilation itself seemed to be kind of redundant. It was just pumping gassy air into rooms full of more gassy air. Knowing the Corpus, the entire research station was nothing but prefabricated rooms that had been slapped together in a few weeks with only a brief set of safety and sanity checks.

The grate was within a few steps of her frame, but just before she could pull back her fist to bash it open, a whistling sound cut through the air outside. She flattened the bulky ‘Frame against the vent walls just in time to dodge one of Ivara’s arrows slicing right through the ventilation cover and shooting down to the other end, embedding itself in the same wall that Mia had needed to climb down about a minute prior.

“You almost hit me, you idiot!”

“ _Almost_ hit you? Sorry, I’ll aim for the head next time.”

Void, she hated him, but he was the best in the business. He probably had similar feelings about her, too, so it was a mutual hatred.

Gripping the edge of the vent pulling her Atlas out, Mia was finally able to get some relief from that awful smell. It was still there – it was everywhere on this damned planet – but at least there was _less of it_ to smell. Raising her Braton Prime, she quickly launched herself over the gap between the vent ledge and the platform opposite, sailing over a seemingly endless drop into the planet’s gassy mass. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t done before. Tucking up her Warframe’s legs and landing with a brief, nimble roll, she sprang back to a crouch and aimed the weapon at the stairs in front of her, checking for any movement near the door beyond.

This tower had been kept separate from the rest of the Corpus’ gas mining operation, but it wasn’t clear why the profit-cult had chosen to leave it alone rather than repurpose it into something else that would make money.

“Cal. Where are you?”

No response came. Getting back on her feet and starting to pace forward, the Atlas kept her weapon trained on the large door ahead, moving up the stairs two at a time and looking out for any security system beams or sensors. She could hear the Corpus machinery moving and whirring around her as it pumped gas through the structure for Void-knows-what purpose: it was just _loud_ enough to potentially drown out the sound of a hidden MOA proxy keeping watch from the corner, or an Osprey drone recording her from overhead. No matter where she looked, it all seemed deserted.

“Cal, if you don’t respond, I’m calling the mission off.”

She didn’t actually mean it, she just wanted him to stop whatever prank he was trying to pull. His communication channel wasn’t actively open, which meant that he was either too distracted to activate it, or…

“Cal! Say somethi-”

“I’m fine, Mia! Shut up and get over here! We have a small problem.”

Instantly breaking into a sprint, Mia started to charge up the stairs, her Braton in one hand and her other ready to punch anything that jumped out at her. This processing tower was supposed to be temporarily decommissioned, but Ordis hadn’t been able to ascertain why that was the case. If the ever-power-hungry Corpus didn’t even want to use it as scrap or storage, then investigation was a top priority, especially after all the experiments that had been going on.

She was moving so fast that she almost tripped at the top of the straight staircase, but managed to keep her balance just in time to avoid falling through the opening door. Behind it was a regular hallway, with Cal’s Ivara standing completely still in the middle. The Tenno himself was over at the other end, tapping at the keypad next to the far door. Not wanting to waste time, she hurried over, keeping her weapon ready just in case something was trying to use him as bait.

“What happened? Wrong place?” she asked, hoping that all of their time spent getting here hadn’t gone to waste.

“Worse. This door isn’t locked, it’s sealed shut.” The other Tenno seemed slightly unnerved, but didn’t let it show in his voice. “They obviously wanted to keep people out.”

“Or keep something in. Whatever, it definitely isn’t related to Amalgams or Sentients. If the records were correct, this place was abandoned around the time the original Zanuka was destroyed.” She sighed and turned away from the door as Cal continued to work on the console, doing his best to open it up. “I’m sure we can handle a few rusty proxies, maybe a Lynx or a Razorback.”

There was a gentle beep as the wide door unlocked, its lights changing from red to yellow – odd. Yellow was generally the colour of doors that needed to be opened manually with a panel, but most Corpus doors were generally auto-opening models.

“And we’re in. Say the word when you’re ready, Mia.”

She raised her Braton and took point right in front of the locking symbol, prepared to receive the brunt of any attacks that came her way.

“On three, then get behind me. One. Two. Three.”

There was a brief two-second period where Mia’s brain failed to catch up to what she saw as the door slid open. Instinctively, her finger depressed the Braton’s trigger as she launched a fully-automatic burst at the creatures behind it, but it failed to leave any lasting impact. Transferring back into his Ivara, Cal opened fire with his Baza submachine gun, the silenced weapon barely audible above the background noise of the gas processing structure’s internal equipment.

Standing in front of them, stretching back for what seemed like miles, was a horde of Corpus troops, half-digested and fully controlled by the Infestation. By the time Mia’s weapon clicked dry as the magazine ran out of rounds, she was already on the floor.

The Tenno girl screamed as she drew her Brakk shotgun-pistol letting loose a few shells before it was swatted from her hands. The Infested didn’t seem to be actively attacking, but they were holding her down, putting the full weight of their twisted, distorted bodies on her Warframe’s limbs. At least they couldn’t infect her, regardless of whether she was actually in the ‘Frame or not.

“Wait, wh- agh!”

Over to her right, she heard Cal yelling through his Ivara as he was also tackled to the floor, Infested Runner and Leapers literally piling on him as if he was being smothered by a living blanket. Behind her, she heard the sound of Corpus soldiers starting to investigate the area, yelling in surprise as they too were overrun. Unlike her and her Tenno companion, they were torn apart, reduced to little more than a lump of flesh for the virus to take as its own.

And then, right on cue, she watched as her Warframe’s energy dropped rapidly, the familiar glow of a Parasitic Eximus flooding her vision. She was physically restrained and unable to use her abilities, but… she wasn’t _dead_. Even if they did ‘kill’ her Warframe, they could just surge the power through it to get it running again, and she wasn’t actually physically there. It was almost like an attempt at taunting her, but the Infested had never shown any interest in acting like that before.

There was no time to question what they were trying to do – the lack of usable energy, combined with the weight and unusually sturdy grip strength of the beasts, made it impossible for her to fight back as they dragged Mia through the doorway. She had no idea if Cal was being pulled in behind her, but she couldn’t make any assumptions here.

_Fine._

Transferring out of her frame, Mia prepared to use her own personal energy reserves to blast them away, opening up a way to escape. The energy-sapping aura of the Parasitic Eximus wouldn’t affect her like this, so she at least had a chance.

Pushing one arm out and channelling her Void energy out, she closed her eyes and tried to perform a Void blast, hoping to knock back the attackers long enough to get her Warframe on its feet again. She felt the energy leave her body and pulse through the air, dispersing it in all directions, and…

_Nothing._

She opened her eyes again. A few of the Infested Runners near her quickly grabbed her exposed arm and pulled her, along with her Warframe, through the door. She continued trying to use her Void powers, but they just weren’t working – she couldn’t even use Transference to get back into her ‘Frame now, no matter how hard she tried. Kicking and screaming, desperate to pull herself free, she felt her heart rate spike as she finally noticed what was actually in the room the Infested had all come from.

Nothing but dark, wet-looking flesh and pus-filled red boils, lining every surface like a living organism. The entire _room_ was covered in the virus.

But they still weren’t attacking. The Infested knew that she was technically immune like this, but they would still normally attack her, or at least try to harm her enough to the point that she’d get kicked back into her Warframe. They simply continued along, dragging her forward and pulling both of the Tenno – and their gear – forward through the door. Mia felt herself shudder at the sound of it closing behind them and locking, the trap resetting itself for a new victim like some kind of carnivorous Earth forest plant.

Sapped of her powers and struggling to think of a way out of the situation, she flailed her head around looking for Cal, who had long since vanished under the tide of horribly mutated Corpus workers. They were probably carrying him off too, but if they only wanted one Tenno for some reason…

_“New patients. Take the female to the theatre and we can begin the operation.”_

The voice was coming from inside her head, seeming to almost penetrate her skull and boom out into their surroundings. Unlike most infested creatures she had suffered the displeasure of meeting, it was a distinctly human voice. Male, relatively young. Arlo? No, he had been a mute. This was something else, something new. She didn’t like it.

Now that she was finally inside this part of the tower, she could see why it was sealed up so tight: everything was consumed with a thick layer of infested tissue, with towers and connections growing up from surface to surface, covering up what must have been millions of credits in Corpus technology. It was easily enough mass to form something like that awful Jordas creature – but from the looks of things, they hadn’t even attempted to escape.

Trying to shake herself free and receiving a tighter grip on her limbs for her efforts, the Tenno decided to just cry out instead, hoping that the voice speaking to her was capable of something more than slaughter.

“Who are you!? One of the Corpus?”

She didn’t shout it towards anything in particular – she had no idea where the speaker even was, or if he physically existed _at all_ – and heard her voice bouncing around the fleshy corridors of the infested tower. The background noise of dozens of Runners shuffling forward around her made it difficult to hear anything else. Something about the situation was making a knot form in her chest, probably the fact that none of this was typical behaviour for the normally-rabid beasts.

_“Administer anaesthetic.”_

Mia was just about to ask what he meant when she felt a sudden pressure on the left side of her head. She was just barely able to glance over before she saw an Ancient walk over, it’s longest tentacle-like arm wrapping around part of her face and lifting her into the air. She had never realised how strong they were, and she didn’t know if she c-

She barely had a second to think about what was actually going on before it smashed her into the ground, part of her skull cracking and blood beginning to leak out. She lost consciousness almost instantly, but in the split second before her brain shut down in shock, she tried to activate transference one more time.

Something wasn’t right. She should have been able to leave.

= = =

“ _Worthless specimens. You will not do._ ”

The voice was bouncing around inside Mia’s head. Her eyes were wide open, but she couldn’t see anything – all around her, the sound of the Infested puppets moving and hunting seemed to be constant background noise, and she could barely tell how much time had passed.

“ _It asks for another body. A body like mine. You are merely living tissue… but here you are anyway. Delivered to me by my faithful orderlies._ ”

Everything hurt. She wasn’t in her Warframe anymore, and it felt like all of the Void energy had been drained from her body, leaving her completely alone and cut off from her usual safety net.

“ _Still_ , y _ou will not be wasted. Nurse? Prepare my scalpel, but leave it on the desk._ ”

Mia tried to open her eyes and see what was actually going on, but it was causing a stabbing pain that ran through her entire brain and made her skin crawl. Grunting in agony, she was finally able to open them to the point where the outside world became visible, and the blur of the light began to fade.

And she still couldn’t see much. Mainly because she was strapped on a table, looking at the ceiling. Immediately trying to use transference, she felt the familiar wave of energy pass through her, then… nothing. She was still there, lying on the hard metal surface.

_“My apologies. I’ve prescribed bed rest.”_

Mia grunted as she tried to wriggle free of the restraints on her arms, legs, and neck, trying to tilt her head to see what was around her. It was still just Corpus walls and oil-black flesh, along with a strange… raised set of platforms. It took her a moment to realise that she was in some kind of medical area, an operating theatre, and each seat was taken by one of the Infestations’ many horrors.

“What in the Void’s name are you doing here? Humiliating me?”

_“No, of course not. I am here to perform the life-saving surgery you require.”_

“ **What** life-saving surgery? I’m a Tenno, I don’t need normal treatment.”

She was prepared to protest, to try and argue with whatever horrible consciousness was holding her here, but she felt her mouth dry up as a strange figure drew near out of the darkness, something much frailer than a regular infested monster. It was too small to be Grineer and too spindly to be Corpus, which didn’t leave many options. In fact, it looked a little bit like…

_“I understand. I was too, once.”_

…a Tenno.

“What? You’re… you can’t be one of us, **they** can’t infect us! They don’t have the biology to-“

_“Yes, yes, calm down, or I’ll have to use the sleeping gas.”_

Something about his tone of voice was so honest that she almost felt sorry for him, but quickly changed her mind once the realised that ‘sleeping gas’ was probably something far worse than the phrase suggested. Her head still felt like it was bleeding from the ‘anaesthetic’ she had been given earlier, and it was unlikely that this strange Tenno had chosen to do anything about it.

He stepped closer, and she noticed that the Tenno-ness only extended to his general shape: everything else was long gone. He almost looked like a golem made from infested flesh, his skin oozing oils and pulsating as the living mass continued to breathe and pump nutrients around itself. He almost looked a bit like one of Arlo’s Zealots, with a living mask that covered and consumed his face: if he even had one. For all she could see, he _was_ a living block of infestation.

_“You must understand. This is for the benefit of both of us.”_

“What is? What are you going to do to me?”

_“First, may I get your name, Miss…?”_

She sighed. This was surreal. An infested Tenno doctor was asking her for a name for some kind of record? It was like one of Ordis’ spooky stories that he told back when they used to occasionally roast sweet treats over fired on the Cetus plains. “Mia.”

_“Miss Mia, I am here to save you. You have a condition that threatens everything important about your life, and only the assistance of me and my nurse can remove it entirely.”_

“Nurse?”

Her question was answered before she could even finish saying the word as a bulky-looking humanoid infested stomped out from one of her blind spots. She could only glance at it from the corner of her vision, but it seemed to be… Grineer. One of the big ones, perhaps even a Kuva Lich. If she got out of this situation alive, that would give her nightmares for months.

_“Ah, lovely. My scalpel, please.”_

The giant Grineer beast leaned over to another table and picked up something long, sharp and very wet-looking. Mia couldn’t see it clearly until it brought it into the light: it was a big infested knife, pointed at one side and hooked at the other, with a middle made entirely of black flesh.

_“Thank you. Mia, today you will undergo a life-saving procedure. There will, regrettably, be a few side effects.”_

“Just let me go, you madman. You can’t kill me, I’m not actually _here_ , I’m back on my-“

Her sentence was cut short by a loud scream as the ‘doctor’ plunged the blade into her stomach, doing it with such force that it clanged against the table on the other side of her torso.

_“I am the doctor here, so I will administer treatment in the **correct** way, thank you very much.”_

She stifled another yell and tried to struggle out of the restraint again, feeling the pain of the stab wound well up as she shook. She had taken worse injuries, and it didn’t actually hurt as much as she expected: it must have gone straight through. “You’re insane! You just punctured my stomach!”

 _“All part of the procedure.”_ He didn’t laugh, chuckle or even let out an amused grunt. He didn’t emote at all, he was deadly serious. She had no idea what to make of any of this. _“The life-threatening condition is in your body, you see.”_

The infested in the seating areas of the operating theatre seemed to emote at the statement, as if laughing. Or was it some kind of fear? Mia coughed, feeling some blood start to pool in a place that it shouldn’t. “What the… Void are you talking about? What condition!?”

Her ‘doctor’ sighed, picking up a filthy bloodstained rag and wiping his hands – or whatever the infested equivalent of hands were – on it. You could still clearly tell he was a Tenno underneath that, but she had no idea if his mind was even still there. The stab wound in her body wasn’t making things any easier.

_“It’s in the brain, you see. There are pieces there that shouldn’t be. You understand what tumours are, yes?”_

“Tumours? I have a brain tumour?”

_“No, no, no. The problem isn’t that you have **brain tumours** , such a procedure is easily fixable these days. But you are aware of what they are?”_

“What? Yes..?” She was still trying her best to stay still, now that there was a sharp object pierced right through her flesh. She had no idea if it had hit any major organs.

_“All-cause mortality among Tenno is at an all-time high, and I am here to save you from that fate. To cure you of the tumour that’s infecting your mind.”_

“Just… tell me what you’re doing…” Not only did she spit out the phrase in pain, but also some thick blood. This was bad.

The infested Tenno reached over to the blade and started to slowly pull it up her body, slicing through her internal structure and organs at a rate slower than anything she’d ever felt before. It was sharp, sharp enough to effortlessly cut skin and bone without so much as a bump against it. She was definitely bleeding now, and bits of her body were beginning to fail at an alarming rate as she continued to yell and grunt in pain between breaths. He was almost cutting her in half, opening her up like she was a cadaver.

_“Calm down, Miss Mia, we need to make the necessary incisions.”_

Her screams began to quiet down as slowly, and surely, she started to die. She didn’t have any idea why any of this was happening, and she wanted to cry, but her brain was beginning to silence itself as it diverted all of its focus on continuing to run the necessary functions she needed to keep thinking. Eventually, the pain went away, and it was just numbness. She couldn’t even feel the blade being wiggled back and forward in her body, and all of the sounds around her were muffled, like they were coming through a thick layer of blankets.

_“Shh, that’s it, just sleep. Things will be better when you wake up. You’ll be happy. Nurse, prepare the next step of the procedure.”_

Just before the Tenno’s eyes failed her and her vision went dark, she saw the strange Grineer-like creature move a small syringe up to her face, then plunge the end into one of her cheeks. She didn’t feel it, of course, but she movement of her head told her that the substance inside had been injected into her.

Then, her eyes stopped working.

Trapped inside her own body, slowly dying and unable to do anything but listen to the muffled noises of her ‘doctor’, Mia felt unusually peaceful. The pain was gone, and she felt numb to all outside stimuli – it was like sleeping, but she was aware of it. Even if she wanted to fight back, she didn’t have the means to do so, and the functions of her brain that controlled those desires were already closed off to her.

= = =

The Infested nurse spoke, her gravelly voice of a soldier being overwritten by the necrotic tissue that used to be parts of her throat. Each word was forced out between pained breaths, the remains of her original body struggling to catch up to the new organs and tendons that had been grown for her by hew new host.

“She is… dead. I will… remove… the corpse.”

_“Which is why I need your full attention, nurse! The dressing, quickly!”_

She stumbled over to one of the room’s rear tables again, picking up a small scrap of infested tissue that pulsed and wriggled in her hands. The various infested watching from the stands started to inch closer to the barrier, almost like they were curious to see what would become of the newest Tenno in this room.

The doctor took the living piece of skin and quickly rolled it up in his hands, squishing it until it formed a small ball, black in colour and still pulsing as if it was the flesh of a full, breathing being. Stepping back over to Mia’s lifeless corpse, he pulled open part of the skin around her opened body – near the ribcage – and dropped it in, watching as it split apart and began to wriggle deeper into every corner of her body. It didn’t take long for the main part of the tissue to crawl up to her head, settling itself by the most important organ of all.

Piece by piece, cell by cell, her brain was eaten by the infested’s flesh, incorporated into its being. Unwilling, unable to fight back, she simply lay there until her sense of self dissolved. Eventually, there was no Mia left. Only the infestation.

By the time she sat up and opened her eyes, the other infested had long since left the room, satisfied that the process was complete. Only her doctor was left, having already freed her from her restraints. Silently, he took her hand and helped her step off the table, glancing up and down her body.

_“Welcome to a better life, Miss Mia. How do you feel?”_

The voice that replied wasn’t hers, although it used her vocal chords perfectly. She didn’t exist anymore, not as an individual. The thing that sat inside her and piloted her fleshy body like a skin suit wasn’t even a being, not in the usual sense.

“Cured.”


	2. First Studies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Deep inside an infested-held Corpus gad mining strut, the patients are observed and prepared for an unknown purpose.

_“A minor improvement. Seventy-five hours until complete structural failure.”_

The infested Tenno watched as the body of his newest patient continued to convulse from beyond the glass, her flesh turning necrotic and slowly dropping off her body. Infested and Tenno skin alike was drying up rapidly, the combination of the Technocyte virus and her biology’s natural Void energy being too much for her physical structure to handle.

He continued to speak into the recording device he kept on her person, one of the only ‘pure’ items left in the gas processing facility. Keeping it out of the hands of curious Runners and Leapers had been difficult, but it was vital to their plans.

_“Patient shows no signs of independence and sentience after sixty hours, up from fifty-five. Void energy begins to interfere at seventy-two hours, up from sixty. C-reactive protein levels remained at six milligrams per litre of blood until ‘death’.”_

Mia had failed them, but she was still a step forward. It was getting far easier to replicate the mutation, but they needed a better delivery method: direct insertion into the body was considerably less reliable than he had hoped, and an alternative was badly needed.

Still, she had been a significant step up compared to their first-ever patient: for one, her spine was still inside her body, and none of her limbs had fused together. In fact, her physical form was mostly intact, but it was internal organs that were failing to meet their standards. It wasn’t what they needed, but it was still an event worthy of study: anything that could resist being consumed by a standard strain of the virus was something that needed to be evaluated and immediately. Raising the digital recorder again, the doctor stepped away from the glass, pacing back and forth in his observation room while the patient’s corpse continued to twitch in her cell.

_“I will attempt to use the patient’s cadaver for study and consider her a partial failure.”_

Placing the small microphone back on the desk where it belonged and switching off the record function, he took another glance at Mia’s body, watching her movements as the convulsions started to slow down. It would likely be a while before she completely stopped moving, but he would assign a few Mutalist Ospreys to the area so that they could stand guard. It was time to check on the progress of one of the previous patients.

Making his way out of the room and into the half-consumed corridor, the former Tenno took a moment to ensure that the doors were locked properly. As he made his way further towards the door of his makeshift ‘office’, he noticed a small group of Chargers trotting down in the opposite direction, their mismatched limbs clanking against the metal flooring as the spines on their backs twitched and fluttered. He politely stepped to the side and watched them pass, amused at how passive they were around other Infested: the majority of the creatures here were Corpus in nature, since they were the most abundant source of life on Jupiter, but he had taken a handful of Grineer corpses with him many months ago.

Letting out a small series of gurgling purrs, the pack of canine-like beasts wandered off, heading further down the corridor and groaning amongst themselves. The Chargers were clearly one of the Technocyte virus’ most effective creations, but he had always felt like he could create something better. Speaking of which, he had somebody else to visit.

Continuing through the long, winding, partially-flesh corridors until he found himself in front of another observation room, the doctor tapped on the console and let the door slide open, stepping through into the large, empty-looking space. It was mostly empty, save for a token amount of computers and irrelevant equipment left over from its original operations. What really mattered was the glass window – or more specifically, the creature behind it.

The design of its body was much more slender than the Grineer variants, owing to the lack of armour and muscle mass. As with the normal varieties, the Tenno’s torso had been twisted over backwards, their spine inverted and their limbs jointed backwards to act as quadrupedal locomotion. Their stomach had become the beast’s back, resulting in their ribcage forming a set of mismatched spines that poked out of the blackened flesh that had grown over them. However, the most distinctive feature about them was their head: with no need for those biological functions, it had been twisted further down their spine, hanging below the area that would be the stomach on a normal canine.

Unlike the Grineer variety, there was no mask involved: the original head was much more visible this way, although it no longer possessed the ability to function correctly. The muscles inside were still moving, occasionally resulting in the mouth seeming to ‘breathe’, but the doctor knew that it was simply a natural process. In reality, the body had created its own vital organs, and any remaining parts of the original Tenno were just the left-overs of their being.

He stepped closer to the slumbering creature and rapped his knuckles on the glass, watching as it seemed to startle awake and stumble to its feet. The Tenno’s hands were far less supportive than those of a Grineer – he would have to do some work on its body to help it retain its balance better. Its body seemed to twitch a lot as it moved, presumably because of the Void energy still lingering inside it.

_“Excellent.”_

The Charger burbled back at him, it’s body shaking slightly. He wasn’t entirely sure of what kind of changes it had undergone, since the original patient had only begun to show external alterations a handful of days ago.

 _“Hmm? Some degree of sentience. Where did that recorder go…?”_ Picking up this room’s dedicated recording device, he prepared to hit the record button, just in case.

The reply was a short grumble, one that he hadn’t heard from the creature before. Or any Charger, for that matter. There were clearly some differences between the conversion processes: he would have to study this further later on. Tapping ‘record’, he started to think of ways to mark down the changes.

_“Tenno patient Marc, update three. The patient has become the first known Tenno Charger, but it remains unstable and weak. Lack of body mass suggests incomplete mutation. I will check for natural killer cell and lymphocyte level increases when – and if – the patient expires._

The ribcage-spines on the mutated Tenno’s back twitched at his voice, and it got up from the hard metal floor, turning its bulbous, vaguely-defined ‘head’ to look up at the doctor’s face.

_“I will now attempt to introduce the Patient to their original Warframe._

Moving back over to one of the consoles behind him, he tapped a few keys and turned back around, watching as an indent in the wall opened up to reveal a pristine Excalibur, its weapons still attached to its back and hands. It took a few minutes for the Tenno Charger to notice the new obstacle, at which point its demeanour completely changed. The idle shaking and grumbling stopped, and it simply stood there, as if unsure what to do.

_“Patient is showing no immediate response.”_

He doctor watched patiently as the charger slowly paced over to the ‘Frame, brushing up against its legs like a pet would. It began clawing at the Excalbur’s thigh, its silence suddenly becoming grunts, then howls.

And then, it tried to use transference.

Even with all of the things he had seen since he joined with the Infestation, the doctor still felt himself flinch as the Charger exploded, it’s body unsuited to the act of transference in any capacity. It wasn’t an actual detonation: the entire creature just seemed to pop like a wet balloon, scatting black flesh and damaged organs around the chamber. A thick red stain coated the lower half of the Warframe, along with a few remaining scraps of tissue that were too coated in the infestation to simply slide off.

_“...patient has burst. I’m considering it a partial failure. Note to self: do not introduce converted patients to their Warframes without considering the possibility of transference.”_

He had considered trying to re-use some of his own Void powers, but now he wasn’t so sure it was a good idea. Transference had been the last thing on his mind, given all the recent failures they had struggled to work around. For every successful Tenno-Infested hybrid, there was dozens that died before the conversion was even finished, and the survivors were often culled down by half within the first two days.

Shaking his head, he clicked off the recorder and placed it back on its desk, taking a short look at the remains of the promising patient. So close, but so far. They could try again, but the unique circumstances that created that _exact_ being would be difficult to identify. Unlike Runners, Chargers and other mass-produced Infested horror, each Tenno could produce new, interesting results. It was a waste, but a necessary one.

Eventually, _something_ would reveal itself. The true potential of the Tenno.

Leaving the mess for the other Infested drones to clear up so that the biomass could be used again, he decided to take another look at the current state of the platform they inhabited. Preventing the others from simply eating through the metal and warping the exterior had taken a lot of effort, but they couldn’t afford to seem like a large threat. For now, the Corpus apparently believed that they had contained him and his kin for further study, only sending a handful of low-ranked crewmen to investigate and check for breaches.

There were none, of course – any sign of expansion could result in the entire platform being wiped out. The real expansion was inside the walls, inside _them_ : they were isolated, growing, always moving towards newer and greater results.

He was still a Tenno, and his gift of infection – a random mutation, an act of poor chance in the dice game of the universe – had made him one of the most powerful beings on all of Jupiter. If you could infect a Tenno, who knows where your limits lay? 

\---

  
Cal didn’t know where he was. He was starving, half-blind and unable to sleep, but he had no idea of his surroundings whatsoever. It was like he was being smothered by his own skin, unable to breathe but refusing to suffocate. While all feeling had left his body, his hearing was still in peak condition, and it was filled with the sound of his own heartbeat as his body struggled to make sense of what had happened to it.

He wanted to cry.

The infested had gotten him, that much was obvious, but anything beyond that was complete guesswork. Was he dead? The fact that his pulse was audible made that a _no_ , but none of his other body functions were active.

Then, he noticed something. His eyelids were closed, but there was something… off about them. He had naturally grown used to the sensation of how they felt on his head, the way that the inner lining gently pressed against his eyeballs whenever he slept. They weren’t _there anymore._

They were on his chest. _It_ was on his chest.

Panicking and trying to free himself from whatever he was stuck in, he felt part of the surface around him give way, pushing as hard as he could with whatever muscles his body was triggering. Light began to pierce in through the rough cracks, turning his vision a deep red as his eyelids still refused to open. What was going on? Where was he?

Gravity slipped away from him as he tumbled forward, the object in front of him peeling away with a sound like meat being torn in two, and he landed directly on a cold metal floor dotted with piles of flesh. His eyes wouldn’t open immediately, but the lids were starting to pull apart, the extraordinary pain shooting through his facial muscles.

And then, through the feeling of his nerves screaming at him and his body refusing to co-operate, Cal could see. Barely, at first, as the light almost rendered him blind. Little by little, his vision returned, and he could make out the shape of some infested mutant straight ahead of him. It was curled up on the ground, writing in apparent pain and flopping about almost like a diseased fish.

It wasn’t until his vision adjusted to the light that he saw it clearly. A humanoid, of sorts, but with its body twisted and contorted until it looked almost recognisable. Its face, or what was left of it, had been moved further down its body, with its left arm split down the middle as if somebody had sliced it lengthways up to the shoulder. The most defining feature, though, was the colour of its body: instead of being a mixture of infested skin and Grineer armour or Corpus metal, it was just meat.

Nothing but raw meat. The muscles of a body, and the nerves that were once kept safe under the skin, but none of the external organs or layers that it was supposed to possess.

The surface in front of him was mirrored.

It was him.

Cal began screaming.

He did everything he could, his split arms desperately clawing at his body to do something about his situation, to salvage _something_ out of his new form, but nothing would work. Unsure what to do, he tried to claw at his own throat, only to find that it wasn’t there. None of his organs were, not how he remembered them.

He hoped that he would at least pass out from shock, but his body refused, and his apparently-intact brain used the pain of his new form as a way to keep him awake. He couldn’t cry, no matter how much he wanted to: he had no tear ducts, no defined face. He had _nothing_.

Calling out for help seemed to work, but the sound was strained, muffled. It wasn’t clear if it was just his ears, but his voice was likely just as tainted by the Infestation as he was. He had been… violated. He _felt_ violated.

_“I trust you are feeling well, Tenno?”_

The voice definitely wasn’t his. Was it the infestation itself, speaking to him through his head? Lephantis and Phorid had both done so once, and that had been when his connection to them was minimal at best. Refusing to respond, he decided to try slamming his head into the mirror – if nothing else, he could die on his own terms.

Leaning back and ramming his forehead – or, at least, the remains of it – into the glass, he felt the splinters enter his skin and sink into his body. Nothing. He tried again, but the sharp pain refused to actually harm him. Again, and again, and again, he tried to crush his own skull against the surface, doing little to wound either himself or the material in front of him.

_“Please, do not damage my nursery! You’ll harm the newborns!”_

Newborns?

Spinning around, Cal saw the remains of the object he had managed to push himself out of. It was one of the Infested spawn pods, like those he had seen so many times before during battle. It was dozens of them, in fact. Maybe even over one-hundred. They were spaced out evenly across the floor, covering the entire large room and almost all sealed up as if they still contained something. He had been inside one of them, but… _why_? Was that how it worked.

_“Stay calm. You are among friends here. You’re a patient, just like your fellow Tenno. You can be healed.”_

Frustrated enough to finally reply, Cal did his best to speak with the new body he had been given, his words slurred and broken. “Patient… I’m not a… patient, I’m… a Tenno…”

A soft, tinny beep came from somewhere in the room, and Cal realised that the voice was being piped in through some kind of audio system. _“Patient had retained some form of sentience beyond parroting words. My first assumption is that it may be the most successful attempt yet. Using the spawn pods may have prevented certain forms of structural or mental decay, although long-term results may differ.”_

“You did this…?”

_“The patient’s health and safety is my responsibility. My Chargers were rougher than expected, but you seem to have recovered well.”_

“Recovered…”

None of this made sense. His entire body was pounding.

_“Come on, you need to rest. Your bed is still there, and my nurse is on standby if anything should happen. Get some sleep and we can continue the procedure tomorrow.”_

He felt tired. Very tired. The spawn pod that he had come from suddenly seemed a lot more inviting, almost comforting. Instinctively, Cal started to stumble back towards it, his rearranged body creaking and squelching as individual parts mashed together or pulled apart to let him move. It was starting to hurt less and less, almost like he was…

No, he wasn’t going to the Infestation take him.

Pulling his mind away from the pod and the idea of whatever twisted rest it would have offered him, he ran straight for the mirror, hoping that at least one of the glass shards would crack off and impale a vital point on his body. With a strong leap, he threw himself face-first into the surface and closed his eyes, letting it shatter around him. The noise of an entire large glass pane cracking under his weight deafened him for a moment, and by the time he hit the floor he could already tell that he was still alive. Hurt, but alive.

_“Hm. Another misbehaving patient. Nurse, can you escort him back to bed, please?”_

Given that there was another room here, the mirror must have been a one-way window, but Cal’s partially-infested brain didn’t really have time to process that. The stomps of an approaching threat forced him to try and scramble to his feet, but he had barely managed to place his sliced-up arms on the flooring before he felt a boot impact on his skull.

When Cal woke up, he was right back where he had started. Starving, unable to see, and surrounded by his own heartbeat inside the spawning pod. Whether it was the same pod or another one, he didn’t care.

This was hell.


End file.
